Monday, 17 March 2014

Make Your Own - Dairy Free Cheese!!

If you are on Twitter (we are @dairyfree), you may or may not have come across @ChubbaNia. For those of you who don't know, Nia is a veritable mine of free from baking information. She's vegan and also allergic/intolerant to heaps of other stuff, including many grains, nuts, legumes etc.

Until quite recently Nia was a free from baker - baking cakes to send off to whomsoever placed an order, but times are hard and she has recently had to give this up. I keep nagging her to start her own blog, via which she could share her expertise with the rest of us, and I'm still hoping she will!

Recently, Nia recently very kindly agreed to share a recipe for dairy free ice cream on our Face Book page and has now kindly agreed to share her method of making dairy free cheese... here! On our blog! We were all good to go, just the other week, but... the recipe has been adapted from another blog called Sweet Roots (which is definitely worth a look), so we were waiting for permission to share the recipe. Mary, the author of the blog has very kindly agreed and we're so grateful.The original recipe uses an ingredient not readily available in the UK and the quantities were in American measurements, so Nia had a bit of experimenting to do.BUT, here it is!

Now, I think this all looks a lot easier than I was expecting, but if that seems all a bit complicated for you, and you'd just like to be able to buy your dairy free cheese, here are some dairy free options for you to consider:

6 comments:

Wow, I never would have thought of making dairy-free cheese...this is great!! I saw you all talking about it on Twitter so was interested to see what was actually in it. Need to make a trip to Waitrose now! And where do you get nutritional yeast from?I also had no idea that if you adapted a recipe you needed to contact the author to ask if it was ok to publish the adaption?! Surely all recipes are adaptions of someones? There are not many recipes out there that can truly be original?! You have got me worried!!!

Hiya Vicki! Nutritional Yeast can be found usually only in health food shops. But, online you can get it from a range of places, including Ocado, Amazon, Vegan Store and Goodness Direct. It looks like this: http://www.goodnessdirect.co.uk/cgi-local/frameset/detail/579698_Marigold_Engevita_Nutritional_Yeast_Flakes__125g.html

Regarding using other people's recipes, I think it is probably quite difficult at times, to be completely original, especially when a lot of other people are covering the same area, but I have been super careful careful since reading this handy article by David Lebowitz http://foodblogalliance.com/a/what-to-do-when-your-content-is-lifted/#more-7597

In the case of this recipe, I noted that Mary, the author of Sweet Roots, actually has a statement on her site stating that people should ask permission if they wish to use her work, and I think that is fair enough. We asked, stating what we wanted to do and why and promised to attribute her and link to her site, and she graciously gave her permission.

At the end of the day, all bloggers put a lot of hard work into their blogs and I don't know whether it has happened to you, but certainly in my experience it is hurtful when someone else lifts ideas/information from my work without attributing it to me - pretending instead that it is theirs. I think it's only fair to give credit where credit is due - especially if someone has spent time, money on ingredients etc. etc. and (as in Mary's case) magicked up a delicious cheese recipe as well :)

If you think, you may need to adjust anything in the light of this. Don't panic. I'm sure that a few links and credits would soon set all to rights and wouldn't take much to edit in.

Welcome

OK, so 'Baby' has grown a bit since first we started out - she's just started school!!!! BUT we're still dairy free. I'm gluten free, as well, among other things.

Whatever your reason for dropping by - whetheryou're already a friend of ours and want to catch up with how we're getting on, or whetheryou're dairy free and are just popping in to see if this blog is any use to you, hope you find what you're looking for!

Happy browsing!

For more discussion about living dairy free, why not find and 'Like' our 'Dairy Free Baby and Me' page on Face Book, or join us on Twitter? We are@dairyfree